( A Movie Review)
If we look back at the last decade that passed by (2000 - 2010) and the phenomenon(s)
that impacted our lives the most, we may come up with various incidents. War against
Terrorism, Emergence of strong India & China, Fight against Corruption, Globalization,Coming of Age of Apple products, Rise of Internet and Social Networking etc.
But if I have to pick one out of these many compelling incidents it has to be the
Economic Crisis and Meltdown of 2008-2009. It shook the world and impacted the
stock broker from Wall Street to the fisherman in Japan.
Big financial giants who had ruled the roost for the past 200 years collapsed in a near catastrophic event and bankruptcy was filed by one and many. People lost jobs, homes,families came on streets, unemployment was rampant, and industries were in record losses, economies collapsed, Credit Ratings went tumbling down, and the tremors can still be felt in the Euro zone.
Charles Fergusson an Award winning documentary film maker brings to us an attempt to
answer these questions with his latest Oscar winning Documentary “Inside Job”.
The documentaries is shocking, brilliant, insightful, and profound and at the same time an eye opener.
Narrated by the ever brilliant actor Matt Damon, it explores the root cause of this
economic plague and unravels the Greed, Irregularities and the Credit mess which the
collective actions of economic policies and activities brought about.
The film's first half-hour is absolutely dead-on. The explanation of what happened is
a chilling re-run of all the events that led up to the financial crisis. It also showed very accurately the denial by everybody inside or outside the industry that such a crisis was even occurring – even up to the last minute before Lehman's bankruptcy.
Inside Job clearly catches some of the anti-banker mood, and the public is quite right to be outraged at how banks refinanced at the taxpayers' expense and paid outsized bonuses.
The movie intelligently brought out well the "capture" of regulators, politicians and
academics who all became cheerleaders for the continued deregulation of finance that
began under Ronald Reagan and that culminated in the great crisis. Massive re-regulation is required to ensure that finance is safely locked up in a straitjacket again.
It further goes in depth to explain the various cause and affects like the recent market instability caused by many factors, chief among them a dramatic change in the ability to create new lines of credit, which dried up the flow of money and slowed new economic growth and the buying and selling of assets. This hurt individuals, businesses, and financial institutions hard, and many financial institutions were left holding mortgage backed assets that had dropped precipitously in value and weren’t bringing in the amount of money needed to pay for the loans. This dried up their reserve cash and restricted their credit and ability to make new loans.
There were other factors as well, including the cheap credit which made it too easy
for people to buy houses or make other investments based on pure speculation. Cheap
credit created more money in the system and people wanted to spend that money.
Unfortunately, people wanted to buy the same thing, which increased demand and caused
inflation. Private equity firms leveraged billions of dollars of debt to purchase companies and created hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth by simply shuffling paper, but not creating anything of value. In more recent months speculation on oil prices and higher unemployment further increased inflation.
The movie is a triumph of cinematic genius and a must watch especially for practitioners in the Banking and Financial Industry.
Comprehension is the first act of Awareness and this movie helps us comprehend the
bigger picture behind the crisis.
This is one story that needed to be told, hats off to the brilliant Charles Fergusson for doing so and with style and substance.
Title – Inside Job
Year - 2010
Length – 120 min
Director – Charles Fergusson
Cast – Matt Damon (Narrator)
Imdb Link - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/
No comments:
Post a Comment